Download or read book Nobody s Son written by Luis Alberto Urrea and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother, Urrea moved to San Diego at age three. In this memoir of his childhood, Urrea describes his experiences growing up in the barrio and his search for cultural identity.
Download or read book Nobody s Son A Memoir written by Mark Slouka and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey Wolff Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial—admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit, and the lies we tell—in an attempt to reach his mother, the enigmatic figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story, the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her, shows the way out of the maze.
Download or read book Son of a Gun written by Justin St. Germain and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop? Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be. Praise for Son of a Gun “[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review “[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”—NPR “If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”—The Boston Globe “A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed her.”—Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book Nobody Will Tell You This But Me written by Bess Kalb and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: VOGUE • FORBES • BOOKPAGE • NEW YORK POST • WIRED “I have not been as profoundly moved by a book in years.” —Jodi Picoult Even after she left home for Hollywood, Emmy-nominated TV writer Bess Kalb saved every voicemail her grandmother Bobby Bell ever left her. Bobby was a force—irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at ninety, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life. Recounting both family lore and family secrets, Bobby brings us four generations of indomitable women and the men who loved them. There’s Bobby’s mother, who traveled solo from Belarus to America in the 1880s to escape the pogroms, and Bess’s mother, a 1970s rebel who always fought against convention. But it was Bobby and Bess who always had the most powerful bond: Bobby her granddaughter’s fiercest supporter, giving Bess unequivocal love, even if sometimes of the toughest kind. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me marks the creation of a totally new, virtuosic form of memoir: a reconstruction of a beloved grandmother’s words and wisdom to tell her family’s story with equal parts poignancy and hilarity.
Download or read book Half the Way Home written by Adam Hochschild and published by HMH. This book was released on 2005-01-07 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book: “An extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). From the author of King Leopold’s Ghost, Half the Way Home is a compelling memoir about a complicated father-son relationship. Adam Hochschild never used the words “Dad” or “Daddy,” just “Father.” The only son of Harold Hochschild—the head of a multinational mining corporation—Adam always felt as though his father remained purposefully at a distance—a demanding, immovable pillar to be respected and sometimes feared. Here, in lyrical prose, Hochschild recounts his privileged upbringing at his family’s estate in the Adirondacks, his coming-of-age in the tumultuous 1960s, and his enduringly conflicted relationship with his father. But as a boy grows into a man, times change and perspectives shift, and a chance for reconciliation emerges from the space between. Hailed by Studs Terkel as “an exquisite memoir of a boy growing up,” Half the Way Home is ultimately the story of a father and his son, and the unexpected peace finally made between them. “It is a primer on the upper class and on class itself, a series of meditations on the burden of wealth to the liberal consciousness and even a commentary on what it means to be a Jew in America. . . . This is a fine and moving book” (People).
Download or read book Cocaine s Son written by Dave Itzkoff and published by Villard Books. This book was released on 2011-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times cultural reporter and author of Lads describes the impact of his drug-addict father on his early childhood, tracing his efforts as an adult to rebuild their relationship and untangle his father's tragic and complicated past.
Download or read book Summer of Deliverance written by Christopher Dickey and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summer of Deliverance is a powerful and moving memoir of anger, love, and reconciliation between a son and his father. Hailed as a literary genius of his generation, James Dickey created his art and lived his life with a ferocious passion. He was a heavy drinker, a destructive husband and father, a poet of grace and sensitivity, and, after the publication and subsequent film of his novel, Deliverance, a wildly popular literary star. Drawing on letters, notebooks, diaries, and his explicit conversations with his father, Christopher Dickey has crafted a superb memoir of the corrosive effects of fame, a moving remembrance of a crisis that united a family, and an inspiring celebration of love between father and son.
Download or read book Boy Nobody written by Allen Zadoff and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They needed the perfect assassin. Boy Nobody is the perennial new kid in school, the one few notice and nobody thinks much about. He shows up in a new high school in a new town under a new name, makes a few friends, and doesn't stay long. Just long enough for someone in his new friend's family to die-of "natural causes." Mission accomplished, Boy Nobody disappears, moving on to the next target. But when he's assigned to the mayor of New York City, things change. The daughter is unlike anyone he has encountered before; the mayor reminds him of his father. And when memories and questions surface, his handlers at The Program are watching. Because somewhere deep inside, Boy Nobody is somebody: the kid he once was; the teen who wants normal things, like a real home and parents; a young man who wants out. And who just might want those things badly enough to sabotage The Program's mission. In this action-packed series debut, author Allen Zadoff pens a page-turning thriller that is as thought-provoking as it is gripping, introducing an utterly original and unforgettable antihero.
Download or read book Nobody s Son written by Cathy Glass and published by HarperElement. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in a prison and removed from his drug-dependent mother, rejection is all that 7-year-old Alex knows. When Cathy is asked to foster little Alex, aged 7, her immediate reaction is: Why can't he stay with his present carers for the last month? He's already had many moves since coming into care as a toddler and he'll only be with her a short while before he goes to live with his permanent adoptive family. But the present carers are expecting a baby and the foster mother isn't coping, so Alex goes to live with Cathy. He settles easily and is very much looking forward to having a forever family of his own. The introductions and move to his adoptive family go well. But Alex is only with them for a week when problems begin. What happens next is both shocking and upsetting, and calls into question the whole adoption process.
Download or read book Memoir of the Bookie s Son written by Sidney Offit and published by Beckham Publications. This book was released on 2003-12-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this slim, elegant memoir, Sidney Offit -- novelist, teacher, and curator of one of the nation's most prestigious journalism awards -- explores with warmth and humor, the complexities of this extraordinary father-son relationship. As moving as it is unique, "Memoir of the Bookie's Son" is a family portrait that will make you think, make you laugh, make you cry.
Download or read book And Now We Have Everything written by Meaghan O'Connell and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as One of the Best Books of the Year by: National Public Radio, Esquire, Bustle, Refinery29, Thrillist, Electric Literature, Powell's, Autostraddle, BookRiot, Women.com "Smart, funny, and true in all the best ways, this book made me ache with recognition." -- Cheryl Strayed A raw, funny, and fiercely honest account of becoming a mother before feeling like a grown up. When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed -- a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood -- didn't exist. So she decided to write it herself. And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a "natural" birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity. Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself.
Download or read book Son of a Critch written by Mark Critch and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A CBC TELEVISION SERIES WINNER OF THE MARGARET AND JOHN SAVAGE FIRST BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE RBC TAYLOR PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE STEPHEN LEACOCK MEMORIAL MEDAL FOR HUMOUR A hilarious story of family, getting into trouble, and finding one's place in the world. What could be better than growing up in the 1980s? How about growing up in 1980s Newfoundland, which—as Mark Critch will tell you—was more like the 1960s. Take a trip to where it all began in this funny and warm look back on his formative years. Here we find a young Mark trick-or-treating at a used car lot, getting locked out of school on a fourth-floor window ledge, faking an asthma attack to avoid being arrested by military police, trying to buy beer from an untrustworthy cab driver, shocking his parents by appearing naked onstage—and much more. Best known as the "roving reporter" for CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Mark Critch has photo-bombed Justin Trudeau, interviewed Great Big Sea's Alan Doyle (while impersonating Alan Doyle), offered Pamela Anderson a million dollars to stop acting, and crashed White House briefings. But, as we see in this playful debut, he's been causing trouble his whole life. Son of a Critch captures the wonder and cluelessness of a kid trying to figure things out, but with the clever observations of an adult, and the combination is perfect.
Download or read book The Orphan Master s Son written by Adam Johnson and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 2012 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The son of a singer mother whose career forcibly separated her from her family and an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. By the author of Parasites Like Us.
Download or read book My Grandfather s Son written by Clarence Thomas and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words. Thomas speaks out, revealing the pieces of his life he holds dear, detailing the suffering and injustices he has overcome, including the polarizing Senate hearing involving a former aide, Anita Hill, and the depression and despair it created in his own life and the lives of those closest to him. In this candid and deeply moving memoir, a quintessential American tale of hardship and grit, Clarence Thomas recounts his astonishing journey for the first time.
Download or read book Sempre Susan written by Sigrid Nunez and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award. "The masterpiece of the ‘I knew Susan’ minigenre" – A.O. Scott, The New York Times A poignant, intimate memoir of one of America’s most esteemed and fascinating cultural figures, and a deeply felt tribute. Sigrid Nunez was an aspiring writer when she first met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, blinding intelligence, and edgy personal style. Sontag introduced Nunez to her son, the writer David Rieff, and the two began dating. Soon Nunez moved into the apartment that Rieff and Sontag shared. As Sontag told Nunez, “Who says we have to live like everyone else?” Sontag’s influence on Nunez, who went on to become a successful novelist, would be profound. Described by Nunez as “a natural mentor” who saw educating others as both a moral obligation and a source of endless pleasure, Sontag inevitably infected those around her with her many cultural and intellectual passions. In this poignant, intimate memoir, Nunez speaks of her gratitude for having had, as an early model, “someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer’s vocation.” Published more than six years after Sontag’s death, Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.
Download or read book Scrappy Little Nobody written by Anna Kendrick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling collection of humorous autobiographical essays by the Academy Award nominated actress and star of Up in the Air and Pitch Perfect. Even before she made a name for herself on the silver screen starring in films like Pitch Perfect, Up in the Air, Twilight, and Into the Woods, Anna Kendrick was unusually small, weird, and “10 percent defiant.” At the ripe age of thirteen, she had already resolved to “keep the crazy inside my head where it belonged. Forever. But here’s the thing about crazy: It. Wants. Out.” In Scrappy Little Nobody, she invites readers inside her brain, sharing extraordinary and charmingly ordinary stories with candor and winningly wry observations. With her razor-sharp wit, Anna recounts the absurdities she’s experienced on her way to and from the heart of pop culture as only she can—from her unusual path to the performing arts (Vanilla Ice and baggy neon pants may have played a role) to her double life as a middle-school student who also starred on Broadway to her initial “dating experiments” (including only liking boys who didn’t like her back) to reviewing a binder full of butt doubles to her struggle to live like an adult woman instead of a perpetual “man-child.” Enter Anna’s world and follow her rise from “scrappy little nobody” to somebody who dazzles on the stage, the screen, and now the page—with an electric, singular voice, at once familiar and surprising, sharp and sweet, funny and serious (well, not that serious).
Download or read book This Boy We Made written by Taylor Harris and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Black mother bumps up against the limits of everything she thought she believed—about science and medicine, about motherhood, and about her faith—in search of the truth about her son. "The memoir dedicates important space to the numbing bureaucracy that often accompanies medical visits, particularly as seen through the eyes of a Black woman in the South. Having moved often within White neighborhoods and educational institutions around her home in Charlottesville, Harris is unflinching about her periodic unease in those quarters. . . Harris also brings humor to bear in moments of great adversity."—Karen Iris Tucker, Washington Post One morning, Tophs, Taylor Harris’s round-cheeked, lively twenty-two-month-old, wakes up listless, only lifting his head to gulp down water. She rushes Tophs to the doctor, ignoring the part of herself, trained by years of therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, that tries to whisper that she’s overreacting. But at the hospital, her maternal instincts are confirmed: something is wrong with her boy, and Taylor’s life will never be the same. With every question the doctors answer about Tophs’s increasingly troubling symptoms, more arise, and Taylor dives into the search for a diagnosis. She spends countless hours trying to navigate health and education systems that can be hostile to Black mothers and children; at night she googles, prays, and interrogates her every action. Some days, her sweet, charismatic boy seems just fine; others, he struggles to answer simple questions. A long-awaited appointment with a geneticist ultimately reveals nothing about what’s causing Tophs’s drops in blood sugar, his processing delays—but it does reveal something unexpected about Taylor’s own health. What if her son’s challenges have saved her life? This Boy We Made is a stirring and radiantly written examination of the bond between mother and child, full of hard-won insights about fighting for and finding meaning when nothing goes as expected.
